Relative Lust: Accidental Incest’s Affective and Legal Resonances

I. Introduction

It was an episode of The Mindy Project that inspired me to query, and to queer, accidental incest (hereinafter “AI”). ¹ Amidst Mindy Lahiri’s sexual exploits as a thick, thirsty, husband-hungry, South Asian-American obstretician/gynecologist, are those of her colleagues. ² In one particular episode, Mindy’s co-worker Peter sees a headless “tit pic” on the cell phone of their mutual colleague, Danny. Danny is visibly and unusually distraught by the fact that Peter has viewed the image and actively tries to prevent Peter from forwarding the picture to his own phone. Having thwarted Peter’s efforts Danny then vehemently insists that Peter not make a mental note of the anonymous “boobies” for his “[spank/crank] bank,” as Peter claims to have already done. In an effort to taunt the obviously uncomfortable Danny, Peter closes his eyes and moans with pleasure as he recalls the nude image. Cue the solo violin’s eerie score and the comedic reveal – the breasts are actually those of Peter’s sister, Sally! Suddenly, Peter is dry-heaving and frantically looking for a place to vomit. “Oh no … oh no…,” he gasps, “I just saw my sister’s boobs! I WAS TURNED ON BY MY SISTER’S BOOBS!” ³

I simultaneously chuckled and cringed when I first watched this scene. I was, originally, intrigued by what I considered the mobilization of the incest taboo to govern consensual adult sexting. However, my interest quickly shifted to an examination of the affective residues of what I’m calling “technology facilitated accidental incest” (hereinafter “TFAI”) – voluntary but unintentional cybersex with one’s kin, via the use of cell phones, digital apps, webcams, chat rooms, instant messaging, DIY porn, tweets, hook-up apps, and sexts. ⁴ I wondered whether Peter’s digital sexual experience was captured by the “ill-defined horror” that is incest and its pervasive taboo, and if so how and to what effect. ⁵

My aim in this article is to explore the intimate relationship between the body, sexuality, technology, popular culture, and incest law. I consider how experiences of AI, TFAI, and consensual incest (hereinafter “CI”) among adults – as well as our consumption of representations of these experiences – affect our perceptions of our bodies’ parameters; their “proper” sexual objects and relations; their boundary violations; and, their legal status. ⁶ It should be noted that while I treat AI, TFAI, CI, and our consumption of representations of these experiences, as discrete sexual experiences with distinct differences – in terms of proximity, passivity, informed consent, legality and more – I also, at times, conflate these as examples of “taboo sex” the affects of which overlap and are not easily contained. Affect, as I am using it here, is best described as that which

is found in those intensities that pass body to body (human, nonhuman, part-body, and otherwise), in those resonances that circulate about, between and sometimes stick to bodies and worlds, and in the very passages or variations between these intensities and resonances themselves. Affect, at its most anthropomorphic, is the name we give to those forces – visceral forces beneath, alongside, or generally other than conscious knowing, vital forces insisting beyond emotion – that can serve to drive us toward movement, toward thought and extension, that can likewise suspend us (as if in neutral) across a barely registering accretion of force relations, or that can even leave us overwhelmed by the world’s apparent intractability. ⁷

In the above-described scenario, Peter experiences himself as having sexually experienced his sister. Moreover, the viewer of this scene laughs (throbs, squirms?) uncomfortably as they vicariously experience Peter’s arousal, his abhorrence, as well as the conflict and/or congruence between these visceral forces, among others. ⁸ While both Peter and the viewer quickly recover their composure, the affective resonances of their experiences lingers; it leaves in its wake an ambivalent intensity, a sense, a memory, a residue of pleasure, disgust, and their intersections. I argue that this affective ambivalence presents both the primary actors and the secondary viewers with an opportunity to query the boundaries of the consensual incest taboo, its meaning, and its in/consequentiality, and, in doing so, poses a challenge to the “logic” underpinning the taboo’s intransigence.

Drawing on a pastiche of affect theory; cultural and media studies theories of human-technological relations; queer, feminist and cultural posthumanist theories of embodiment, subjectivity and sexuality in an information age ⁹ ; and, Eve Sedgwick’s notion of a “reparative reading,” I consider how new technologies and popular media intersect with one another and the body to collapse into each other dichotomies such as human/machine, mind/body, material/virtual, subject/object, consumer/consumed, present/absent, feeling/action, fantasy/reality, “real” sex/cybersex, and ultimately legal/illegal. It is only when these theoretical frames are brought to bear on one another and applied to non-normative experiences of incest that we can better understand the boundaries between cyber- and off-line sex, the status of the sexual taboo, and the potential implications of these for the legal regulation of consensual adult sexuality. Ultimately, this article brings these theories together to help make sense of, and to grapple with, how experiences of CI, AI, and TFAI, and representations of these experiences – in popular culture, pornography and public service announcements (PSAs) – are generative of new sexual epistemologies and ontologies, different layers of sexual reality, and alternative realms of existing relations with implications for our sexual lawscape and for the discriminatory assumptions that inform the criminalization of consensual adult incest. ¹⁰

I begin my analysis from the supposition that consensual adult incest is a valid possibility. ¹¹ The word “incest” is inflammatory. It has traditionally denoted two quite different forms of criminalized behavior – non-consensual and consensual – however, the latter is rarely the first typology that comes to mind, in large part because most modern incest criminal convictions stem from non-consensual physical relations involving minors. ¹² Nonconsensual incest overlaps with acts of child sexual abuse, rape and statutory rape that are coercive in that they usually involve a disparity in age, authority, and dependency between two family members. Consensual adult incest, in its more normative guise, involves heterosexual intercourse and/or marriage between adult persons who are known to be closely related to one another. ¹³ Accidental incest blurs the consensual/nonconsensual distinction to the extent that it describes a physical sexual relationship between family members that is consensual until this consent is (purportedly) vitiated (culturally and/or legally) by the knowledge that the object of one’s desires is actually their kin. TFAI potentially adds to this incest taxonomy to the extent that the “threat” of incest is extended to “virtual” but nevertheless “real” cyber-sexual relations.

Consensual incest remains a crime in many countries and jurisdictions around the world (including the US, UK and Germany). Often included in the category of “close relatives” are biological parents, children, siblings, and half-siblings. ¹⁴ Depending on the jurisdiction the category may also include cousins, aunts, uncles, nephews, and nieces. Laws prohibiting consensual incestuous marriages exist in all fifty US states. While only a few states ban sex between first cousins, many include non-biological relatives, such as step-parents and step-children and adoptive parents and adopted children. ¹⁵ In most US states consent and context are largely irrelevant to a consensual incest prosecution. Adult siblings who were raised apart and who did not meet and begin a consensual sexual relationship with one another until after they both turned 18 could be, and indeed have been, prosecuted under incest laws alongside relations that lack consent and involve large age and power differentials. ¹⁶

The foundation upon which the legal regulation of consensual incest rests is multifaceted. More typical and prominent rationales include: concerns about consanguineous relationships producing children with disabilities; protection of children from sexual abuse at the hands of relatives; the protection of “the family” more generally by preventing intra-familial sexual jealousies and conflict; the prevention of immorality; conformity with religious commands; and the idea that incest prohibitions developed because of the social advantages of forming ties outside the family. ¹⁷ Additional, more tacit but no less forceful explanations include maintaining dominance over “uncivilized Others”; xenophobic attempts to protect the nation from “contaminating Others”; and the cultural logics of the neoliberal state. ¹⁸ Despite the fact that legal commentators have persuasively attacked these foundations as discriminatory and inadequate justifications for prohibiting consensual incest, the taboo and consensual incest’s criminalization persist. ¹⁹

Given the tenacity of the incest taboo and the ongoing criminalization of consensual incest, novelists’ and screenwriters’ long-standing fascination with consensual and accidental incest is unsurprising. This fascination continues to date, although as is demonstrated here, digital and reproductive technology more frequently occupies an honored place in CI, AI and TFAI plot-lines. ²⁰ What then, if anything, is different about this contemporary moment with respect to the obstinacy of the incest taboo? How, if at all, do reproductive technologies, digital technologies and representations of CI, AI, and TFAI intersect with one another, and to what end? In what ways, if at all, might these experiences and their representations contribute to the destigmatization of consensual incest and to its potential decriminalization?

I suggest that representations of CI, AI and TFAI in popular culture and pornography, present alternative and new affective opportunities for users and viewers to experience the “messy and capacious world of public sexual encounters” ²¹ ; expand our emotional and erotic desires; and potentially destigmatize and decriminalize consensual incestuous relations. I take as my starting point Michael Warner’s contention in The Trouble with Normal, that people commonly do not know their desires until they find them. ²² He writes:

New fields of sexual autonomy come about through new technologies: soap, razors, the pill, condoms, diaphragms, Viagra, lubricants, implants, steroids, videotape, vibrators, nipple clamps, violet wands, hormones, sex assignment surgeries, and others we can’t yet predict … The psychic dimensions of sex change as people develop new repertoires of fantasy and new social relations, like “white” or “construction worker,” not to mention new styles of gender and shifting balances of power between men and women. Through long processes of change, some desires too stigmatized to be thought about gradually gain legitimacy, such as the desire for a homosexual lover. Others lose. Even desires now thought to be natural and normative, such as equal romantic love, only came into being relatively late in human history; they depend just as much on politics and cultural change as do the stigmatized ones. ²³

Part II of this article sets the scene by briefly describing a spate of recent consensual incest, accidental incest, and technology facilitated accidental incest plot lines in mainstream popular culture, pornography, and public service announcements. The goal here is to evidence how actual incestuous experiences as well as the fantasy of consensual incest is woven into our cultural zeitgeist and how these representations have expanded with the introduction of digital and reproductive technology and have shifted from the margins to the main stage of popular culture. In Part III I shift gears and theorize the bodily and boundary violations that these experiences and their representations give rise to. Here I employ cultural, queer and feminist posthumanisms as well as affect theory to consider the embodied experiences of CI, AI and TFAI, and their cultural representations. Adopting the position that the body is virtual and the virtual is somatic, ²⁴ I query cybersex’s status as “real” sex – by virtue of its excess of affects, intensities, sensual movements, emotional residues, despite an absence of normative notions of touch, proximity, penetration and reproduction. I explore how these theorizations of the boundaries, nature, meaning and affects of the virtual body and cybersex queer sexual and familial relations and in doing so potentially reshape questions of sexual taboo. In Part IV I bring these sections together and offer a reparative reading of these experiences and their representations. Returning to Warner’s contention that “the psychic dimensions of sex change as people develop new repertoires of fantasy and new social relations” I examine the ways in which these experiences and representations – facilitated as they are by reproductive or digital technology – destabilize the fantasy/reality binary in ways that potentially reconfigures the experience of consensual sex between adult kin as not an outright “yuck,” but instead as a forceful “maybe.” Even this small shift, I posit, has implications for the regulation of consensual incest and the moralistic, ableist and xenophobic foundations upon which this politico-legal regulation rests. ²⁵

II. CI, AI and TFAI in Popular Culture, Porn, and PSAs

Examples of contemporary television shows depicting factual, if not valid, consensual incest plot lines include, but are far from limited to: True Detective (2014–); Top of the Lake (2013); Game of Thrones (2011–); Arrested Development (2003–2013); Bored to Death (2009–2011); Boardwalk Empire (2010–2014); Dexter (2006–2013); Lost (2004–2010); and Brothers and Sisters (2006–2011). The nature of the relationships in these examples involves some combination of siblings, step-sibling, adopted-sibling, parent-adult child, parent-adult stepchild, and cousins. They cut across genres such as horror, drama, comedies and crime procedurals. ²⁶ This seeming ubiquity has prompted entertainment writers to ask: “Why is incest all over prime time?” ²⁷ and “Has pop culture changed our perception of incest?” ²⁸ While many of the CI plotlines involve characters that are represented as self/destructive they are also tender, erotic, and loving, prompting additional entertainment news headlines such as: “[Twelve examples of] (consensual!) incestuous relationships that didn’t make our stomachs turn” ²⁹ and “13 Incestuous Pop-Culture Couples With Cringe-Worthy Chemistry.” ³⁰

The allure of consensual incest is not limited to the creative minds of scriptwriters seeking new ways to titillate and maintain a wider audience base. Fans of the show Supernatural have created digitally manipulated images of its two male leads, the Wincester brothers, in bed together (aka “Wincest”), ³¹ and fan-fiction stemming from the popular children’s film Frozen (2013) casts the two sisters, Elsa and Anna, as lovers (aka “Elsanna”). ³² Both examples can be described as satellites of their cousin category “twincest” – a term that is used to refer to the fraternal twin brother-sister relationship in Game of Thrones; is referenced in the 2014 film Gone Girl; and which identifies a popular genre of pornography.

The prevalence of plot lines involving accidental incest is also notable. Indeed, Sofia Bull’s forthcoming analysis of crime procedurals produced in the early 2000s points to numerous episodes concerned with the causes and effects of accidental incest, such as: CSI (2000–2015); CSI Miami (2002–2012); Law and Order Criminal Intent (2001–2011); Law and Order Special Victims Unit (1999–); NCIS (2003–); Numb3rs (2005–2010); and Perception (2012–2015). ³³ In all of these shows, she writes, “the investigators typically stumble upon a case of ‘accidental incest’ while investigating another crime – usually a murder – which has either been committed to break-up the incestuous couple or to keep the relationship a secret.” ³⁴ “In short,” Bull notes, “the taboo nature of incest – and particularly, the possibility that the relationship might result in an inbred child – is depicted as a motivation for murder even when the relationship as such is completely voluntary and harmonious.” ³⁵

While consensual and accidental incest is depicted in fictional television shows as some combination of erotic, comical, sad, doomed, if not all out destructive, the pornography industry has adopted a divergent approach. ³⁶ Twins have been present in gay pornography since the 1970s. ³⁷ More recently the Visconti Triplets, advertised as “the first and only triplets in gay porn,” have appeared in a variety of incest-themed videos. ³⁸ Unlike most incest-based porn websites with actors who merely pretend to be related, the Triplets do not physically touch each other. Instead, they either masturbate together or simultaneously gratify the same individual(s). Elijah and Milo Peters, on the other hand, are two, now 24 year old, Czech identical twin brothers who, according to one commentator, “French kiss … perform oral sex on each other … have anal sex; and most shockingly of all, they do it in a tender and romantic way.” ³⁹

One additional representation of technology facilitated accidental incest – an anti-sexting child protection campaign produced by the Dutch group “My child online foundation” – is also deserving of mention here. ⁴⁰ In it, we see two white older teens, a boy and a girl, who are seated at their remote and respective computers, engaging in a webcam facilitated “chat” with one another. The viewer is provided with the perspective of the male teen who has typed something (in Danish) into his chatbox. He then leans in to his monitor where we see a split screen; at the top right is a video feed of a headless female wearing a red t-shirt with a skull and bones on it, directly below it is a live feed of the headless torso of the boy whose perspective we are privy to. We then see the girl begin to remove her shirt, which prompts the boy to stand up and take off his pants but not his boxers. The viewer is invited to infer from his actions that the male teen intends to show his penis to the girl via his webcam and/or masturbate for/to/with her. At this point all that we can see of the girl is her white naked torso and her hands covering her naked breasts. Off screen the boy’s mother calls him downstairs for a meal and he quickly pulls up his pants and shuts off the computer. He hurries down the stairs and is devouring a bowl of spaghetti before a blonde teenage girl wearing a red t-shirt with a skull and bones on it takes a seat at the opposite side of the table. We then witness the two recognize each other’s respective shirts as those of the individuals they were instant messaging with. The boy remains hunched over his bowl, seemingly frozen by the realization that the girl in the webcam is actually his sister. The girl, revealing little emotion, slaps down the newspaper she has just picked up and slumps back in her chair, crossing one arm protectively across her lower stomach and lap, presumably to settle her upset stomach and/or possibly to counter her newfound sense of exposure. The viewer is then provided with the campaign’s tagline, again in Dutch, which translates loosely to: “Internet sex: It can make you really ill!” ⁴¹ – referring, presumably, to the disgust and emotional distress experienced by both the shocked siblings in this PSA as well as by its viewing audience.

Given the extension and mainstreaming of incest plot lines involving digital and reproductive technology, in the following sections I consider the potential implications of these experiences and their representations for our contemporary cultural moment. With the foundations of consensual incest’s criminalization being actively challenged by legal scholarship, if not case law, at least not successfully by case law, I examine the opportunities that these experiences and representations present for disrupting consensual incest’s socio-legal regulation.

III. TFAI: Cybersex as “Real Sex” and the Shifting Scope of Sexual Taboos?

In this section I theorize the bodily and boundary violations that these experiences and their representations give rise to. Feminists, post-structuralists, queer theorists, critical race scholars and phenomenologists, among others, have long theorized the body – its borders, matter, meanings, affects, and relations. ⁴² Lines of inquiry about dis/embodiment have been expanded and extended by cultural studies, science and technology studies, and communication theorists interested in bodies’ relations to culture, technology and to cyberspace. ⁴³ Cultural and philosophical posthumanists, in particular, have theorized embodiment and the liberal humanist subject in an information age; ⁴⁴ cultural manifestations of moral perspectives on technology’s relationship to the body; ⁴⁵ and technology’s extension of bodies’ boundaries and embodied awareness, among other issues. ⁴⁶ Combined, these works blur binaries of human/machine, nature/culture, mind/body, public/private, physical/not-physical, real/virtual, and thus trouble the social and political entitlements that flow from liberal humanist ways of organizing and knowing the world. ⁴⁷

According to queer theorists Halberstam and Livingstone, posthuman bodies “are the causes and effects of postmodern relations of power and pleasure, virtuality and reality, sex and its consequences.” ⁴⁸ “Technologies that remake the body” they write, “also permeate and mediate our relation to the ‘real’: the real is literally unimaginable or only imaginable within a technological society: technology makes the body queer, fragments it, frames it, cuts it, transforms desire …” ⁴⁹ Within this line of thinking the virtual and the real collapse into one another and in doing so generate other realms of existing real things and different layers of reality. ⁵⁰ Brian Massumi’s work in Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation extends this line of thought by querying affect, perception, cognition, causality, and time in relation to technology and the sentient body. ⁵¹ In one example he recalls a scientific experiment whereby patients who had been implanted with cortical electrodes only felt electrical pulses on their skin if the stimulation lasted for more than a half second. He postulates that the minimally perceivable, half-second lag between the beginning of a bodily event and its completion in an outwardly directed active expression is not missed because it is empty, but rather because it is overfull. ⁵² “[D]uring the mysterious half second, what we think of as “free,” “higher” functions, such as volition, are apparently being performed by autonomic, bodily reactions occurring in the brain but outside consciousness, and between brain and finger but prior to action and expression.” ⁵³ This, he suggests, requires a reworking of how we think about the body. ⁵⁴ “Something that happens too quickly to have happened, actually, is virtual. The body is as immediately virtual as it is actual.” ⁵⁵ Just as we think about the body as virtual, so too can we think of the virtual, as somatic. ⁵⁶ The cybernetic body, understood as an informational pattern, is never wholly disembodied. ⁵⁷

This theorization of the liminal and virtual body has implication for our understanding of the boundaries, nature, meaning and affects of cybersex and virtual intimacies. ⁵⁸ For the purposes of this article cybersex is understood as one manifestation of virtual intimacy. While virtual intimacy is not necessary for cybersex to occur it is also not necessarily absent by virtue of the online context. Indeed McGlotten challenges the supposition that virtual intimacies are “failures before the fact” or not “the real thing.” ⁵⁹ In answer to the question “what is real intimacy?” he posits, as previously noted, that the virtual is not opposed to the real and moreover, “intimacy is already virtual in the ways it is made manifest through affective experience.” ⁶⁰ If the virtual is real and productive of new realities and real intimacies, cybersex – punctured as it is by corporeality – can also be understood as real sex involving new sets of relations. But this first begs the question, “what is real sex?” Historically, the answer to this has been heterosexual and reproductive physical intercourse. Again queer posthumanism is instrumental here. As Halberstam and Livingstone note, heterosexual biological reproduction “is merely one possible function of one possible kind of fucking, as well as merely one of the many kinds of reproduction required to perpetuate the code of the human.” As such, they suggest that, “there is a curious lack of specificity in the term ‘fucking,’ a lack of coherence among its connotations, its variable associations with pleasures and pains, with reproduction, with specific penetrations or frottages, with rhythmic frictions. What is allowed to be fucking?” ⁶¹ By way of an answer they suggest that the coupling of fucking and reproduction has never been able to:

direct the traffics among power, pleasure, and bodies – traffics which include but are by no means exhausted by female ejaculation, sex-without-orgasm, orgasm-without-sex, sex-without-ejaculation, ejaculation-without-orgasm, reproduction-without-sex, sex-without-fucking, … It becomes possible to assert a non-relation between fucking and reproduction the relation upon which patriarchal humanity is predicated – because of the diversity of sexual practices, partly because of technological options, but mainly because the point where they converge is no longer an adequate anchoring point for a meaningful or workable system. ⁶²

So, within modern Western culture where sex is not reduced to fucking and fucking is not reduced to reproduction, the boundaries between sex, sexuality, and intimacy are blurred. Sex can therefore be understood to include an “array of acts, expectations, narratives, pleasures, identity-formations, and knowledges.” ⁶³ This description, however, departs from Foucault’s contention that sex and sexuality have “distinct meanings, with sex representing the physical act that is a ‘family matter’ and sexuality representing individual desire and fantasies.” ⁶⁴ As Foucault writes in The History of Sexuality “sex is the most speculative, more ideal, and most internal element in a deployment of sexuality organized by power in its grip on bodies and materiality, their forces, energies, sensations, and pleasures.” ⁶⁵ So, while sex cannot be conceived of outside of the field of sexuality the two are nevertheless viewed as somewhat distinct. Power precedes sexuality and sexuality precedes sex. But such a distinction becomes somewhat less helpful, according to Chris Ashford, when “real” and “virtual” lives collide in cyberspace. ⁶⁶ He writes, “Cyberspace may be seen as more of a forum for sexuality than sex; yet this Foucauldian dichotomy too is queered by cyberspace, with new fluid conceptions of ‘family’ brought forward and the personal individual desire becoming a family desire for however momentary a period.” ⁶⁷

When making claims about cyberspace and cybersex’s queering of sexual and kinship relations Ashford is referring to cyberspace and cybersex as productive of non-traditional family or relational structures including: chosen families, adopted families, blended families and families created with the aid of new reproductive technologies. ⁶⁸ He is not, I believe, speaking to how cyberspace and cybersex affects a re-imagining of consensual incestuous relations as queer relations. This may be, in part, because the very same queer sexual and familial relations that he is speaking to are often cited by the religious right, and reified by gay and lesbian activists, in their discussions about whether gay and lesbian sex serves as the start of the slippery slope to non/consensual incest and thus to moral decay and social degeneracy. ⁶⁹ As Cahill notes, same-sex relationships and incest both represent a “departure” from the symbolic norm – namely, “a deviation from the prototypical way in which sexual identity is created, and maintained, in the family.” ⁷⁰ Those who opposed same-sex relations thus use the incest taboo as a means of positing a slippery slope from the former to the latter. Their discursive proximity is used to incite disgust towards the other. ⁷¹ However, this same effect stems from gay and lesbian activists’ explicit denial that such a slide will occur, ⁷² thus implicitly validating the much-maligned slide theory and reifying the incest taboo’s “persistent place of ‘honor’ at the bottom of the slippery slope.” ⁷³

In the midst of these changes and the challenges they pose, perceptions of the realness of cybersex have reshaped questions of sexual taboo. Whereas Ashford wonders whether viewing our virtual selves as less real in some way allows us to consider virtual deviant behavior – namely infidelity online – to be less of a taboo, ⁷⁴ psychologists such as Shirley Glass have argued that infidelity – any emotional or sexual intimacy that violates trust – can constitute one of the greatest betrayals even if it does not involve physical contact. ⁷⁵ At the same time, the mainstreaming and corporatization of infidelity, as is captured by the adulterous dating site Ashley Madison.com, raises questions about the taboo status of cheating in a context wherein polyamoury and non-monogamy are increasingly being challenged, if not yet normalized. ⁷⁶ So, if we view our virtual selves to be equally real to our offline selves, as posthumanists have posited, is virtual “deviant” behavior equally taboo to off-line sexual deviance, or have our relations and techno-cultural context shifted such that the sexual taboo of CI, AI and TFAI has tempered? In this last section I query CI, AI and TFAI’s affects, movements, intensities and residues and consider what they contribute to cultural, feminist and queer posthumanists’ reconfigurations of our perceptions of our bodily boundaries, sexual and kinship relations and their legal violations.

IV. Reparative Readings and Expanded Repertoires of Fantasy/Reality

In this final section I offer a reparative reading of representations of CI, AI and TFAI in popular culture and pornography. I consider the role played by technology and mainstream culture and pornography in reconfiguring our perceptions of our bodily boundaries, sexual and kinship relations, thus facilitating the potential demise of the consensual incest taboo and CI’s criminalization. It is not my intention to advance a claim that decriminalization equals sexual liberation; to offer a deterministic or hypodermic thesis about media effects; or, to counter the dominant “disgusting-therefore-bad” narrative with an oppositional yet potentially equally simplistic “desirous-therefore-good” one. Rather, as Albury and others have claimed with respect to pornography, I suggest that these technology facilitated experiences and popular storylines present us with an ethical and productive opportunity to consider the ways that flawed, imperfect and ambivalent interactions and cultural texts offer us “a space to rethink the contemporary sexual landscape.” ⁷⁷ Drawing on Eve Sedgwick’s notion of “reparative reading” – wherein affect is not disavowed in the rush to make meaning, and claims to ownership over “truth” are viewed as foreclosing a different future ⁷⁸ – I contend that representations of CI, AI and TFAI provide a form of sexual storytelling that may serve as an important part of many people’s self-recognition as sexual subjects and of their sexual relations as both legitimate and legal. ⁷⁹ These popular representations, like those within the realm of pornography – including pornographic representations of consensual incest – represent a diversity of sexual experiences and identities. They also give rise to ambivalences, intensities and affective residues that can affect sexual and legal change. In addition, and by way of a return to Warner’s contention that “the psychic dimensions of sex change as people develop new repertoires of fantasy and new social relations” I examine the ways in which twincest within Internet pornography destabilizes the fantasy/reality binary and in doing so extends new bodily and erotic relations.

Lust, love, sadness, hilarity, doom, destruction in some combination factor into and result from most of the above-noted experiences of CI, AI, TFAI and their popular representations. To evaluate these representations in exclusively moral terms – as either “good” or “bad” representations – “forecloses their potential as tools for teaching and learning about changing sexual practices and sexual subjectivities.” ⁸⁰ Indeed, the examples of AI mapped and analyzed by Bull offer their audience a range of learning opportunities. As Bull argues, the fact that AI plot lines emerged on network television with such prominence in the early 2000s can be understood as capitalizing on a moment when developments in DNA technology and biomedicine sought to “affirm traditional Darwinist ideas about biological kinship as significant, substantial and enduring.” ⁸¹ At the same time, however, they also simultaneously called for “a radical redefinition of kinship by providing new means for human intervention into the reproduction process.” ⁸² However, Bull ultimately suggests that despite acknowledging that a process of redefinition is in progress, “the crime procedurals primarily articulate a traditional and essentialist perspective on biological kinship, which is in line with their decidedly conservative and critical portrayal of new assisted reproduction technologies and various types of ‘chosen families’.” ⁸³ Indeed, while some of these plotlines explore the intricacies of incestuous feelings and relations, most mobilize the trope of accidental incest to problematize and police voluntary sexual acts that are deemed biologically “unnatural” and reproductive practices and family structures that are deemed socially “unsuitable.” As such, they are regularly “solved” with either the death of a character or the death of their romantic sentiments. At their worst the procedurals deliver the explicit take-away message that accidental, or accidental-turned-consensual incestuous lust/love is shortsighted, immoral, harmful and that its practitioners are uncivilized, dangerous, killers, thus fostering normative claims about CI and AI’s “wrongness.” ⁸⁴

While these procedurals undoubtedly traffic in repronormativity and heternormativity as well as classism and xenophobia, their meanings are unstable and not closed. ⁸⁵ Indeed, the very digital and technological context that fuels their narrative arcs transforms the context within which they are experienced and interpreted. For instance, the celebration of genetic purity within many of the AI and CI narratives, as well as the implied slippery slope to off-line consensual sex with kin threatened by some of the TFAI texts I have described above may increasingly hold less persuasive sway in our contemporary context. As Bull notes, cases of accidental incest are usually depicted as voluntary relationships without any elements of coercion and sexual violence; they are almost solely problematized on the basis of genetics. ⁸⁶ Increasingly, however, the power and persuasion of “genetic risk” arguments are being challenged in ways that diminish the condemnatory reading of these texts. ⁸⁷ For instance the ableist foundations upon which these threats largely rest have been actively challenged by critical disability studies and disability rights movements. ⁸⁸ Moreover, the reality of increasingly more and more children being conceived via reproductive technologies and the growing body of work debunking the greater probabilities of genetic risks in instances of consensual incest – including works which analogize consensual incest’s risks to other, non-criminalized, “risky” reproductive practices such as the increasing number of women over 35 who are conceiving and giving birth – raise questions about the “harmful” ontology of accidental and consensual incest in our current cultural and technological context.

In this contemporary context a reparative reading of representations of CI, AI and TFAI present opportunities to forge new meanings and new erotic relations. Even if we can posit with some certainty that representations of CI and AI remain predominantly ableist, hetero- and repro-normative, as well as tacitly classist and racist, as Albury, drawing on Sedgwick, asks, “So what? What does this reading … tell us that we don’t already know? What does it offer those who strive for social change, other than the grudging consolation of ressentiment?” ⁸⁹ In the spirit of offering a reading that serves a purpose other than that of a prescriptive tool of domination I shift now to a consideration of what these representations may reveal about “changing sexual practices and subjectivities.” ⁹⁰ A reparative read of the representations mapped earlier on in this article might go something like this: Within popular culture, consensual incest’s status as consensual is vitiated by natural law/social pressure/legal rule whereas accidental incest – tech facilitated or otherwise – is consensual until the parties’ consent is (presumably) vitiated by the knowledge that the object of one’s desire is, in fact, their kin. These CI, AI and TFAI storylines are rarely “all bad” or “all good” but rather are often ambivalent. They are also productive of myriad political and affective resonances. They leave in their wake a form of political speech as well as an intensity, a sense, a memory, that despite the couple’s abhorrence upon discovering the taboo nature of their sexual relations, their fondness, lust and/or love for one another was/and or remains, in some measure, pleasurable, fulfilling, resonant, and real. This presents an opening for an interpretation of these relationships as redeemable, if only they and/or their society could come to terms with the legitimacy of their relative love/lust. Despite their sometimes overwhelmingly negative and stereotypical representations of consensual and accidental incestuous relations as disgusting, destructive and an explicit threat to one’s sense of dignity, personal safety, the community, the repro-normative family, and the nation, so too do these experiences and their representations present mainstream audiences with an opportunity to vicariously, tacitly, and affectively experience these relations as simultaneously benign, tender, erotic, authentic, and familiar. They have the potential to affect within their viewing audiences an awareness and an acknowledgment of their own desires; their identifications with and affinities to the characters; as well as feelings of compassion, sympathy, support and the inconsequentiality of the relationship in terms of its harms. With respect to the crime procedurals, they also advance the possibility of an alternative reading wherein danger and harm to oneself and others is recognized as not inherent to the incestuous subjects and their sex object choice, but rather is a product of society’s prejudices. In this alternative reading the responsibility for murder does not fall squarely on the shoulders of the consensually incestuous subjects but is potentially shared by members of a socially intolerant society.

Speaking to debates regarding pornography, Albury argues that the plethora of pornographic texts – websites, magazines, self-help manuals and videos and DVDs – are reflections of cultural currents that include both radical and regressive understandings of sex and gender. They also serve as examples of possible sexual stories that can be tried on for size. She goes on to claim:

Increasingly, too, they [pornographic texts] are sites that can be contested and challenged by the audiences who seek to produce, rather than just consume, sexually explicit media … [R]ather than condemning porn in moral terms for teaching “the wrong things,” I believe it is worth applying ethical thinking to the question of why porn is so appealing; and considering reparative answers to the question of what porn teaches, and what audiences learn from it.

It has been long argued that cyberspace and access to online pornography provides a disinhibiting space, one where individuals can behave in ways they wouldn’t dream of doing “in real life.” ⁹¹ However, whereas the screen has been thought to hold apart fantasy and reality, this distinction has also been blurred by feminist, cultural and queer posthumanist theorization of human-technology relations. As discussed in the preceding section, cybersex can be understood and experienced as real sex, virtual intimacy constitutes real intimacy, and thus TFAI, may potentially be experienced as a real incestuous relation. Not only does the Internet offer a space to engage in and experiment with gender, sex and sexuality it also offers new opportunities to play out sexual fantasy/reality. Fan culture and the creation of Wincest and Elsana, as well as twincest in pornography serve as two such examples. But as we have also seen, play, fantasy and the building of virtual worlds online – wherein people imagine, develop, and negotiate creative and alternative sets of social and sexual relations – intersect with sexual realities off-line. To consider the potential implications of this for the consensual incest taboo and CI’s criminalization, I would like to return briefly to the example of twincest in Internet pornography.

In another online article, this time in praise of the Peters’ twins’ incestuous pornography, one commentator claims to have determined: “The 4 Reasons You’ve Gotten Over Twincest (And Started Thinking It’s Hot).” ⁹² The reasons, in descending order, include: 4) The biological risks are eliminated; 3) The love story; 2) They’re hot; and 1) It’s still forbidden. The article’s author claims: “We can talk endlessly about how erotic it is to think about twin brothers laying down together, but it remains the ultimate mind fuck, and that’s often what porn is to many: an escape to the ultimate fantasy. That it’s so wrong makes it so right – if you swing that way.” ⁹³ There are a few notable aspects of this argument, namely the mobilization of non-reproductive sex to simultaneously reify/nullify the taboo’s ableist foundation, as well as the purifying effect of romantic “twinky” love on taboo sexuality. ⁹⁴ Of most interest to me, however, is the extent to which an acceptance of twincest rests on its ongoing abjection; the viewer “gets over” twincest’s “not-hot” reality by embracing it as a perpetually disgusting fantasy. That it is “so wrong” culturally, as well as in one’s thoughts, makes it so viscerally appealing to one’s (social) body. But of course the Peters’ twins and their sexual relationship with one another is not inherently wrong, nor inherently disgusting, nor is it merely fantasy. “The ultimate mind fuck” is that this example of twincest does not simply blur the disgust–desire dialectic and the mind/body binary it couples fantasy with reality in the networked private–public sexual realm. ⁹⁵

Although attempts to theorize the “mindfuck” have met with criticism ⁹⁶ this concept brings something to bear on my consideration of popular and online pornographic representations of CI, AI and TFAI. As Horsthemke argues, unlike theorizations of “bullshit” ⁹⁷ the term “mindfuck” is unique “in that it has both a physical and a mental (or psychological) dimension – which produces ‘a kind of internal semantic dissonance (lexical friction).’ ⁹⁸ Like the physical fuck, the mindfuck presents a form of manipulation that ‘is not exclusively negative; [it] is sometimes used to describe the positive sensation involved in having, or in being presented with, some striking new idea, or in having some sort of agreeably life-altering experience.’” ⁹⁹ For McGinn, a film, a book, a performance, even an academic lecture or paper may all be described as a mindfuck with productive results. Combined, pornographic and mainstream representations of fictional and actual CI, AI and TFAI have brought the mindfuck that is CI, AI and TFAI to a place of “on/scenity.” ¹⁰⁰ That is, our culture has actively brought into its “public arena the very organs, acts, bodies, pleasures that have heretofore been designated ob/scene and kept literally off-scene.” ¹⁰¹ Of course the work of the queer, feminist and cultural posthumanists canvassed in the previous section would extend this mindfuck concept further. If we accept, based on their theorizations of the virtual and the real, as well as the extension of the body’s boundaries by technology, that “having sex” and fucking extend to and include cybersex, so too are the Visconti Triplets – who are described as “playing” with the incest taboo without apparently breaking it because they don’t touch and/or penetrate one another, also fucking with each other, our minds, and the incest taboo. While it is suggested that the triplets toy with the incest taboo and offer viewers endless pleasure by withholding the anticipated catharsis of engaging in “actual” sex, in reality the idea of “real” sex has been thoroughly extended, if not fully destabilized. In this context I suggest that CI, AI, and TFAI occurrences and plotlines – with their ambivalent narratives and complex affective residues and interpretations – make it possible for CI to become more intelligible, avowed, admissible, consequential, aesthetically meaningful and reformist.

V. Conclusion

Consensual and accidental incest have a long history of representation in literature, film, and art. Unsurprisingly, they remain titillating and popular plotlines, and, as Foucault’s theorization of the repressive hypothesis reminds us, they offer examples of how the policing of sex is not exclusively dependent upon “the rigor of a taboo, but [rather] the necessity of regulating sex through useful and public discourses.” ¹⁰² That said, experiences of, and representations of, technology facilitated accidental incest nevertheless extend and trouble this taboo’s taxonomy. In doing so, they raise questions about the ontology of bodies, sex, fucking, kinship, consent and violation and thus potentially shift the nature of taboo and its legal status. Both the first-hand experiences of AI, TFAI and CI, as well as the fictional and realist representations of these experiences, contain within them the residues of the affective, discursive and material conditions within which they were created and interpreted. While historically, and even contemporarily, these narratives may continue to bolster the normative claim that adult incest, in its consensual and accidental guises, is reprehensible, so too do these experiences and texts offer opportunities to investigate and reimagine its pleasures and ambivalences. It remains to be seen, however, whether and how these cultural scripts, affective residues, and emotional insights may modify the stigmatization of consensual incest within our socio-legal imaginary.